Chicago Gets Its Strength From Neighborhoods

Communities Give The City Its Character

"In some neighborhoods, people are organizing (against) drugs and crime, in others they're rebuilding housing, and in some they're organizing merchant groups or designating historical areas," he says.

"I believe the neighborhoods are the last defense. If the neighborhood goes, the city goes and the nation goes. To make the neighborhood work, people have to get involved. They can't sit back and let others do the work."

Ethnic and religious similarities are less important today than they once were for many long-established Chicagoans. But building a neighborhood on similarities is still a common practice for immigrants, which is evident in ethnic enclaves on the North and South Sides.

"For Hispanics, East Asians and Eastern Europeans today, that similarity is important in developing neighborhoods," deVise says. "There are many neighborhoods in Chicago that have gone through waves (of different ethnic populations). Ukrainian Village, for example, was Polish, then Hispanic and now Eastern European again, with a new wave of Polish immigrants in recent years."

Today, the settlement houses, Park District playgrounds, community centers and even the churches may not have the binding power they had a century ago.

"At one time it was Father O'Malley and the parish-and they're still important," Northwestern's Hunter says. "But the thing to remember is that people can create organizations themselves that will help foster a better sense of neighborhood."

In many communities, they are being supplemented by newer institutions formed by residents just as insistent on building good neighborhoods.

In Pilsen, for example, the Interfaith Community Organization, which reaches into neighborhoods on a block-by-block basis, urges residents to pray, celebrate and work at social service together.

In Lincoln Park, the Sheffield Garden Walk and the Oz Park Fair are among events that draw neighbors together.

And in Austin, members of the Northwest Austin Council go door to door to talk about resident concerns and organize people around issues, such as drugs and crime, education, abandoned housing and city services.

But perhaps the most important way Chicago neighborhoods contribute to quality of life is in providing a sense of community in the midst of a massive city. They offer a kind of surrogate for small-town life, deVise says.

"You have the same kind of cohesion in some Chicago neighborhoods as you would in a small town," he says. "It's that cohesion that makes neighborhoods appealing. And it gives dwellers of a large city a sense of community they otherwise wouldn't have."

"For cities to survive," Daley believes, "they cannot become places for only the rich and the poor. They must also comprise neighborhoods filled with working families and middle-class homeowners.

"Our neighborhoods are the key to our survival because they represent our best hope for keeping middle-class people in Chicago."